THE BEASTS THAT PERISH

(also published as “The Accident Epidemic”)

Some of us on The Team don’t even know that it exists. We’re never told about it when we’re hired; nor are we ever given the real reasons for our hiring. And those of us (like me) who do catch on, seldom even discuss it with each other. On paper, The Team doesn’t exist at all. It permeates other agencies; we shuffle filing cards, or act as couriers, or translate documents, or diddle with computers, and each of us has been checked very, very carefully where security is concerned, not only by the hush-hush people but by Colonel Samuel Warhorse, who either is or isn’t a displaced Army medic, and who once or twice a year goes back to Oklahoma to do his thing as a Medicine Chief of the Osage Nation, and who’d be captain of The Team if it existed, just as I’d be his second-in-command.

The best way to describe it is by using the example of water departments and their dowsers. Just about every major city water department has one or more dowsers on its payroll—but never as dowsers, because water-witching still isn’t quite respectable. They’re hired as backhoe operators, or truck drivers, or whatever, and there they are, ready to do their real job when necessary.

That’s how it is with us. Somehow our real jobs filter in to us, always through Chief Sam, and we tackle them and do our best, and afterwards everybody forgets all about them, just as people forget about water department dowsers when they fill their bathtubs.

What sort of jobs? Problems that defy ordinary, logical solutions. Puzzles that make no sense. Perils materializing for no reason out of nowhere. Disasters that simply cannot be, but are.

For instance—

Chief Sam called me at 11:30. “We’ve got another one, Garry,” he said. “Smells like a real collector’s item. How’s about lunch at noon?”

I didn’t argue I already had a date. I cancelled it, and half an hour later, when he walked into the chop house with two other characters, I was waiting for him.

I stood up, and he introduced them. Two were state police captains, one out from Pennsylvania, the other a tall, rangy, local Western type named Tod Welles; the third, with a French name and nice manners, was an R.C.M.P. [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] superintendent from up across the border.

“Douglas Garrioch,” Sam told them. “He used to be a fly-boy. Sometimes he turns out to be pretty useful.” He grinned at me, his eyes black-agate under his black sequoia eyebrows and gray hair, and slapped me on the shoulder with a hand like a bear-paw. We ordered drinks, making small-talk till the waiter brought them. Then there was silence. I looked at him.

“Our problem for the day,” he said, “is simply stated. “During the past week, the fatal one-car accident rate has suddenly gone up—by four-thousand eight-hundred and some-odd percent.”

“Where?” I asked.

“The entire United States and all of Canada. Garry, that means that almost fifty times as many people as usual have started smashing their cars into concrete abutments, plunging them into rivers, rolling them down cliffs—and at top speeds. And at night, only at night. Folks are getting spooked. Insurance companies are already having fits. The press is starting to get too damn interested and making noises. So far, nobody’s released the real statistics, but there’s no way to keep the local police and sheriffs quiet. It’s lucky winter’s almost on us, so there’s weather to blame it on, but the story’s sure to break wide open before too long—and we just can’t afford that kind of panic.”

“So?” I said, feeling those familiar small cold feet along my back.

“So you go back to work. You dig right in and find what’s going on, and just who’s killing whom—if there is a who. The boys here’ll fill you in on everything they know. It’s yours from there. Now let’s have lunch.”

They told me while we ate. They were experts in their field, specialists on highway accidents, and they had all the facts and figures at their fingertips, all the hows and wheres and whens—and nothing else, no whys. I asked the obvious questions, trying to find a pattern that’d link everything together.

What about the drivers? What kind of people were they? That angle had been pretty thoroughly explored; they were just about every kind. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that most of them had done a lot of freeway driving—the percentage of big-rig truckers was astonishing—but there were too many exceptions to lay down a rule. Otherwise, they were of all ages, sexes, races, driving every kind of car or truck and a few motorcycles. Almost always, they had been alone, or just about alone, on the road, with the next vehicle at least half a mile away; and always, always they had been going way over the limit—estimated speed 80, 85, 90, sometimes about a hundred.

How about passengers? Well, there’d been just a few, no bus loads, no big groups, not even any foursomes—and all strictly in the past tense when found.

“Any last words?” I asked. “Did any of ’em drop any kind of hint about what happened? About what might’ve hit ’em?” And I was told that no, they hadn’t, not really. There’d been a salesman in Ohio somewhere who was still alive when they pulled him out; they thought he screamed out something about hitting a coyote before he coughed up blood and died, but they weren’t sure, and anyhow no coyotes had been anywhere around those parts since frontier days.

Besides him, there was just a doctor in Saskatchewan, out on the motel circuit with his office nurse; she had lived long enough to whisper something that sounded like “squirrel… squirrel… squirrel…”

“The birds and the beasts were there,” quoted Chief Sam. “An odd coincidence.”

“Odd—but hardly pertinent,” the R.C.M.P. man shrugged. “People say weird things when they’re dying.”

And that was that. They had no more to add. Chief Sam and I walked them to the door after he’d paid the check, and he said how I’d keep in touch with them, with Welles especially, and how they’d pass on all reports to me; and I guess somebody had briefed them—they asked no questions about how we’d operate. Then the Chief and I went back into the bar for one more drink and my instructions.

“Hit the road, Garry,” he said. “Tonight and every night, till you find out something. Stay on the freeways, particularly the Interstates. There’ve been a few bad ones on back-country roads, but its the freeways where everything’s been really happening. Here are your credentials, state and federal.” He grinned. “They’re sort of hoked up for the occasion, but they’re genuine and guaranteed to impress everybody, even us Honest Injuns.” He handed me two cards and an enamel-and-gold badge. “They make out you’re sort of a cross between Ralph Nader, Oh-Oh-Seven, and the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. Don’t throw their weight around unless you have to.”

“Thank you, Heroic Leader,” I said, knocking off my drink. “You’ve put me in the ticket-fixing business. Now I can make my fortune and retire, and take Marina on a trip around the world.”

“Any time,” said Chief Sam, “after you stop those folks getting themselves killed off. Now don’t forget to fill your tank—you’re going to need it.” His grin disappeared. “Take care, Garry, and give that lovely girl of yours my love.”

I drove back to the office, and checked out early; and drove slowly up to the apartment, thinking about The Team, and Chief Sam and Marina and myself, and how the strangeness of our natures and our backgrounds and our lives had brought us together to do jobs that needed doing and otherwise would never have been done.

Take me, for instance—three of my grandparents were of Scotch descent, by way of Nova Scotia; the fourth was French and English mixed. And there was second-sight on both sides of the family. My great-grandfather Garrioch had seen visions, and known when death would come for friends and relatives there in the cold Western Isles.

His son, my grandfather, had it also; but it was different in him, for almost never was it conscious. Usually it simply guided him in simple acts, things done or not done to keep one out of danger; he fought four years as an infantryman in World War I, in the Black Watch, and lived to emigrate—very nearly a survival record.

My father inherited it again, and it protected him after he moved down to New England to fish the harsh Atlantic, and in the Navy all through the Second War.

In my case it again had changed. I didn’t know I had it until I took my first tour as a chopper pilot in Vietnam. Yes, it protected me—but it also told me, quite consciously and definitely, when death was going to strike—when Charlie was going to slam his rockets or mortar shells into the base, and who on any mission wouldn’t make it back.

What do you do with that kind of talent? You don’t report yourself to Headquarters. No, you worry about it, and maybe drop a hint to a close friend or two when you feel they’d ought to hit the sick list, and grieve when they won’t take your advice and end up dead. Then, if like me you’re very, very lucky, maybe you run into someone like Chief Sam. He was doing his stuff there at the great base hospital in Saigon, and I was taking a routine physical; and next thing I knew somehow I’d told him everything, and his advice had been simply to accept it, to say nothing, and to keep in touch. We’d be seeing more of one another, he said.

So there I was, driving home to my golden girl, thinking that if it hadn’t been for him probably I never would’ve met her. She had been born in Hawaii, on Maui, her father an Icelander, her mother Japanese, and she was golden-skinned and glowing, and so delicate that she looked almost breakable. She was as sensitive as a Gothic heroine, and as tough as whalebone.

She had to be. Her talent had just missed being her tragedy. She is an empath. Even as a child, she could feel—in each degree, in every terrible detail—the agony of others. Not physical pain itself, but its tormenting tensions and its terrors, the futile thrashings of trapped minds trying to cope with other kinds of pain.

It is a talent unhappily too common, and children born with it often become autistic, withdrawing totally into themselves, for in societies that deny and fear the extrasensory, they have no way of learning how to distinguish between exterior agonies and those genuinely their own.

But Marina’s parents were wise enough to listen, wise enough not to put her down. They had no rules to follow, so—instead of calling in the headshrinkers—when she was seven they took her to her grandmother in Japan, who had retired to a convent for Zen Buddhist nuns. There she was cared for until she was 14, visited at least twice a year by one or another of her parents and in constant touch with all her Japanese relations. And there she learned, not how or why her talent came to be, but how she herself, her being, her spirit, could live with it and maintain tranquility.

When she returned to her father and mother in Hawaii, it had in no way been suppressed, but now she knew how to avoid the dangerous chains of emotional identification, how to say, “This agony’s not mine, it is not me,” how not to react to it.

And yet a visit to a hospital was still, for her, an act of heroism, and she would ask me to detour for miles rather than pass a penitentiary, an insane asylum, a slaughterhouse. For her talent differs from ordinary telepathy; distance is an important factor in it, and so are numbers. She can handle the impact of suffering individuals well enough, but groups still can overwhelm her. She cannot heal; except very rarely, with people whom she loves, she is powerless even to ameliorate. She can only feel.

In the islands, she went through high school and then on to college, taking a degree in librarianship—a wise choice, for libraries have more books than people, and books, whatever torments they contain, don’t broadcast them. Then she got a job stateside, at a small college library in eastern Washington; and that was where Chief Sam ran into her—by accident, of course, the way he always seems to find his people. He was asking her a question at the reference desk when, without warning, she just came out of gear, leaving the conversation dangling. She turned deathly pale; her pupils dilated; she gasped for breath. It took her several minutes to pull herself together, while he watched.

And then they heard the sirens. Some self-tortured kid, stoked up on speed and LSD and God knows what, had climbed the campanile tower and tried to fly. She had tuned in him in that first dreadful second when he had found that he could not.

Chief Sam coaxed it all out of her, and found her a new library job at a nice quiet computer center in Cinnabar, the little Colorado mining town half grown up where The Team works—still small enough so that you aren’t psychically snowed under as you are in, say, Chicago or New York, but big enough to hold those government subagencies we need to keep us going plausibly.

He introduced us. I saw her glowing skin, her strange, green-golden eyes, her hair like the fine black lacquer of a household shrine in ancient Nara, and instantly I knew the joy and fire of her temperament, and the tempered strength under her gentleness and her fragility. We drew together, feeling one another before we had so much as touched our hands; and it was wonderful that neither she nor I, nor Chief Sam even—neither then nor later—had to conceal why we were there, what we were all about.

That made it a whole lot easier, for we needed no barriers of security between us. I could tell her exactly what I was getting myself into, just as she could tell me. So as soon as I got home I phoned her on the job and asked her to take the rest of the afternoon off. I filled her in on the whole deal, and told her there’d probably be nights I’d have to spend away from home. She shook her shining head, and smiled ruefully. “I guess there’s just no limit to the things some men won’t do to get out of making love to their poor, lonely wives,” she said.

And of course, with that, I had to pick her up, laughing in my arms, and carry her into the bedroom.

We went to dinner early, and I told her everything again, somehow hoping that she might, intuitively, think of an angle we had missed. Those drivers, I repeated, driving at top speeds and late at night, must’ve seen something, something startling enough to make them swerve suicidally. The only alternative was to believe spooks were riding with them, or flying saucer people were suddenly controlling them, or the Russkies or Red Chinese were playing with a new secret weapon. For a few moments, she responded with that look people get when they are searching in themselves, but when she spoke it was only to say that she didn’t like the freeways.

“I’m not happy on them,” she said, looking a little puzzled. “There’s—well, there’s something wrong about them. But it’s too vague. I can’t get hold of it. It’s only strong enough to make me feel uneasy.” She took my hand in both of hers. “I know it’s silly of me, Garry, with your—your talent. But you will be careful, won’t you? Promise me?”

It was six days to Thanksgiving. The weather had been nasty for a week, but the night was clear. The highways had dried off, and though yesterday’s snow blanketed trees, houses, hillsides, when I reached I-25 it was all clear going and the traffic was moving ten miles an hour faster than the law allowed, with the big rigs and some other drivers pushing even beyond that.

I got my first signal around 10 o’clock, near a side road leading to a little town called Penfield, so I followed my nose down the off-ramp, and within three miles I came to it—a crazy, telescoped VW van, crushed against a cruelly jagged rock-fact. There was a wrecker there, and two state police cars, and a sheriff’s deputy, so I pulled off and showed the sergeant my credentials. He was properly impressed and treated me like I wish people had when I was in the Army.

“Another one of these goddam one-car deals,” he commented, “and not even on the freeway. Lucky it’s just a lousy hippie down the drain—probably higher than a kite on something. He’s on his way to Penfield in the meat-wagon.”

I spent 15 minutes with him, and though he kept repeating we wouldn’t find a thing, he did help me search the area; and he was right, of course. There wasn’t anything.

“I wish to God we could’ve found it,” he said. “Just once, to take the curse off this crazy business. If you’re working on it, I sure wish you luck. Believe me, it’s getting to us all!”

That was the first of five that night. The second was just about a duplicate, right off an interchange on 25, only the car looked like it’d been brand new and probably a Cadillac. The third was a huge diesel truck lying on its crushed cab at the foot of a steep embankment; I got there almost right away, even before the ambulance, and it was a messy deal—messy enough to shake me and the two policemen. The next was standard—a concrete overpass, ripped chunks of what had been a passionate Porche, a young man’s body underneath a blanket. The fifth was something else again—a flaming, smoking heap of unidentifiable wreckage half a straight mile down the mountain side, with the cops and me and the trucker who’d reported it staring helplessly and talking about getting a crew down there come morning.

There were no clues at any of them.

I’d called Marina before midnight from a coffee stop, to tell her where I was and that I loved her; and by 3 a.m., more than a hundred miles from home, I holed up in a flea-bag motel, ate a sandwich, drank half a pint of bourbon, and hit the sack.

I slept till noon—after all, my working hours were going to be from dark to dawn—then made my calls to Chief Sam and Tod Welles, and learned that there was nothing new except a scare story in a national tabloid, which wasn’t making anybody happy. I spent the afternoon talking the situation over with state and local police, doing none of us much good, and had dinner with a superannuated sheriff who’d actually forbidden his wife and kids to use the highways after dark.

That night was like the first, only there were seven of them instead of five; it had rained and snowed a little, and we had bad slick spots here and there. I drove where instinct told me, and again learned nothing.

For the next three days, the pattern scarcely varied. I followed 25 clear up into Wyoming and back down again. I followed I-70 for almost 300 miles west of Denver, coping with more bad weather, bedding down at night with my bit of bourbon to dream about Marina—with a nightmare or two about fatal crashes to keep me on my toes. I had nothing to report except somebody’s testimony at third hand from the state police, who’d had it from a sheriff’s deputy, who had it from a shepherd type driving an old pickup: he’d been following one of them maybe a quarter-mile away, and he thought maybe he’d seen some sort of shadow moving right in front of her before she hit.

Then, late on the fourth night, after 2 a.m., I pulled into a truck stop to get myself together. I’d just come from the nastiest wreck of all—a truck and trailer filled with something flammable. It had gone off at a sharp curve, hit some trees and flamed instantly. I was there long before the police arrived—in time to hear the driver screaming—and there was absolutely nothing I could do but watch the flames. When it was over, I went into the truck-stop restaurant, ordered a T-bone and coffee to drink while it was cooking, drank half the coffee, filled the cup up again from a pint I kept against emergencies, and found myself listening to four truckers in the booth behind me. They were fresh off the road, and they knew the man whom I’d heard die.

They made the usual profane comments about the one-car crack-ups, only they said one-rig instead, and they indulged in the same foolish and futile attempts to explain them, or explain them away. Then, “Goddamit, okay!” growled one of them. “That was a hell of a way to go, but—ah crap, man! If it had to happen could you have picked any guy you’d rather have it happen to?”

“Don’t talk like that, Slavich,” barked another. “Grayber was a bastard, sure he was, but Jesus!—he was human, wasn’t he?”

“Human? Like sour owl shit he was human! Remember how that poor damn girl of his always looked like she’d been beat up on? Well, she had. And talk to anybody who’s rode with him, or right behind him even. Twice I seen him try to nudge cars off the road when he figured nobody was looking. And he’d run over every critter crossed the road ahead of him—dog, cat, ’possum, you name it. The sonnabitch’d speed up to catch ’em. He’d swerve to cut ’em down. Hell, for my money he had it coming!”

They kept on arguing about the dead Grayber for a bit, with nobody getting really mad about it, and then the talk changed to women, and I quit listening. I ate my steak—a good one—but somehow it didn’t really grab me. I kept remembering that driver in Ohio who’d screamed about hitting a coyote, and the nurse in Canada who’d died mumbling “squirrel… squirrel… squirrel…” My mind just wouldn’t chase the thought away. When I drove off, I told myself to stop imagining a connection. Sure, there’d been people who’d killed themselves trying to keep from running down a dog, but chances were most had been inexperienced drivers.

There was only one more that night; and next day, when I phoned in, Chief Sam told me to come on back for Thanksgiving. Marina and I could have the night together, and then next day, unless we had a date, would we have dinner with his family?

I told him we were free as air, we’d love to; and then he told me that he and Tod Welles had been taking Emmie Bostwick to every crash site they could think of. She was part of The Team, a black girl from around Baton Rouge, with a genius for sensing felonious little plans being hatched or carried out anywhere near her—even a day or two afterwards.

She had a courier’s job, a good cover for sudden travelling, and the Chief used her when terrorists or blackmailers were making threats. She was pretty close to being infallible; and she’d detected nothing, absolutely nothing. Chief Sam felt that if there was dirty work afoot it was a long-range deal, and it might even help for me to take a two-day break.

So I called Marina and gave her the good news, and in her voice I could read not only pleasure but relief. “Oh, I’m glad, lover! At least I’ll have you off those freeways for awhile. Last night I had an awful dream—I guess it wasn’t really awful, but in the dream it was. It scared me, and I’ve been worried for you ever since. Garry, don’t laugh—I dreamed you ran over a poor raccoon.”

I didn’t laugh, partly because once I had; and, coming home, I drove more carefully than I usually do.

Thanksgiving Day, I took time out in the afternoon to get together with Tod Welles and his R.C.M.P. friend and compare notes. We told each other what we could, and ended up just where we’d started, on line one. Then, at around 4:30, Marina and I drove out to the Warhorses’. Chief Sam has about 20 acres a dozen miles out of Cinnabar, near a weird little place called Dudgeon, where there’s nothing but a service station, a general store, a bar, a hashhouse, and a combination city hall and volunteer fire department—but only half a mile off the good main road, where you can snake around the mountains without losing too much speed and with about half of it freeway so nobody can really hold you up. It didn’t take us long to get there; there wasn’t even a whisper of bad weather.

We were greeted by Chief Sam, his wife Connie, three kids, a pretty Warhorse cousin from some university out West, two big brown Labs, a Siamese, and a striped tabby cat. The Warhorses told us it was heap good for stupid palefaces to come in out of the cold and drink firewater with the friendly natives; and we all sat there before the huge fireplace, surrounded by dogs and cats and kids, talking, laughing, and forgetting that along the miles of road that hold our world together people were suddenly smashing to their deaths.

Our conversation flowed from one culture into another; tales were told born in traditions continents apart. Nobody spoiled things by trying to hog the floor; when disagreements showed themselves they became friendly fencing matches instead of duels. Then we went in to dinner, and let the turkey dictate to us.

We left just after midnight, still glowing, and at the door we were kissed goodnight; and when I shook Chief Sam’s hand I knew that he, even as I myself, at once regretted that tomorrow it would be back to work—and looked forward to it.

The night was frosty; the air was crystal clear; never had there been so many stars across the sky. Quickly, we left Dudgeon sound asleep behind us, and in moments we were at the freeway entrance. I turned into it. I speeded up. And, as I did so, I felt again, suddenly, that something was all set to happen—and the feeling, as it always is, was laced with fear.

“Damn!” I said, only half aloud. “Not tonight!”

Marina heard me. “Garry,” she whispered, “are you sure?”

The feeling, oddly, was a little different. I couldn’t tell exactly how, but that didn’t change it. “Yes, I’m sure,” I told her. “I wish to God I wasn’t, but I am.”

“Can’t you—can’t we ignore it?”

I shook my head. In the rearview mirror I could see the single light of a motorcycle coming, coming fast.

That’s him! I thought, as he swept by, doing 80 or 85—and yet, somehow, I wasn’t sure it was him. Still, whatever it might be, I knew that he was part of it.

“This one may be special,” I told her, stepping on the gas. “There’s something strange about it. We’ll have to see.”

She didn’t say a word. Her hand moved over and rested lightly on my knee.

For three miles we followed him, taking the mad curves, never letting him get more than half a mile away. Then we came to a long, straight, downhill stretch. We passed a sign saying JEFFERS PASS, TURNOFF 2 MI. There ahead of us was the interchange, a concrete bastion pierced by two sally-ports. Our motorcyclist was heading straight toward it. I could feel apprehension building in me. I could feel the tightening of Marina’s hand against my thigh.

The concrete rushed toward the motorcyclist. It rushed at us. It seemed to grow. There was the second sign. There, very suddenly, was the turnoff.

And, so abruptly that for an instant I thought he’d lose control, the motorcyclist hit his brakes and, tires shrieking, swerved sharply to the right, taking the turnoff, barely making it. I forced my eyes back to the road in front of me. I heard Marina scream—

In my headlights, right in the middle of my lane, less than a hundred feet ahead of me, there was a wildcat, white fangs bared, ears back, eyes burning bright—

And he was 25 feet high.

How many impressions can you crowd into a quarter-second? How many decisions can you make in half that time? I recall Marina screaming; my hands doing their damndest to twist the wheel; my brain, in shock, still forcing them to freeze, forcing my foot to floor the throttle instead of trying for the brake. I remember my mind telling me that cats are not as hard as concrete. I don’t recall whether or not I closed my eyes. We hit. There was no impact, none. There was a timeless instant in which I felt surrounded by flesh and fur, by the idea of fur and flesh, by an animal odor, musky and far away. Then we were through, and through beneath the overpass, and nothing lay ahead of us but open road. I looked up in the mirror, and there was nothing there.

Then the reaction hit me. Fearing that in a moment I would be trembling uncontrollably, I let my foot leave the throttle. I let compression slow us down. Finally I pulled off onto the shoulder, stopped the car with a jerk.

Beside me, Marina’s scream had dropped to a small, wailing moan, ululating hysterically. I switched the engine off. Trying to control my almost spastic hands and arms, I reached for her.

“Darling, darling!” I cried out, shaking her by the shoulders. “It’s all right! We’re safe! Everything’s all right!”

She stared at me out of enormous eyes. Her moaning stopped. “Let me go!” she cried out, pulling violently away. Then she covered up her face and wept, her head thrown back, her whole body shaken with her weeping.

“Sweetheart! Marina! It’s all right!” I kept repeating foolishly. “It was a hologram—some kind of a projection. That’s all it was. I tell you, we’re safe. There’s no need to be afraid!”

She dropped her hands. Still weeping, she threw herself at me. “Afraid? Afraid? Of course I’m not afraid! What was there there for me to be afraid of?” Her small fists hammered at my shoulder, at my chest. “My G-G-God, are you a log? A stone? C-can’t you feel anything at all?”

I simply stared at her, helpless before her terrifying intensity.

“My God, my G-G-God!” she sobbed, covering her face again. “Those animals! Those poor, poor animals! Oh, God, when I think of the c-callousness, the utter emptiness, the—the abandonment, the uselessness! Oh, damn you, damn you! You’ll never understand!”

Once more, her weeping shook her; and I, shaken by her words, made no attempt to touch her. An endless minute passed, lacerated by her sobbing, a minute and another and a third—then suddenly it was over. She dropped her hands again; she sighed, a sound so sad and so forlorn that any hurt I might have felt was swept away. Gently, she reached out to me.

“I never should have said that,” she whispered. “Garry, not to you. I’m sorry. It’s just—just that you’re a Westerner. In Asia, we see things differently. Besides, though you can see perils in the future, I—I share agonies right now. Have you ever thought what we’ve been doing to the animals? On every highway, Garry? We run them down, but it’s not death that counts—” Her hands clutched at mine. “We all die, men and beasts. In the wilds, an animal will die, and it’ll be eaten, by other beasts, and birds of prey, and scavenging insects. At least its substance goes to sustain more life.”

“How about men killed in war?” I said. “By earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes?”

“We’re on a different level. Most of us. Animals have to feel their deaths aren’t purposeless.” Her voice rose. “Garry, did you know that sometimes one caribou will actually allow a pack of wolves to eat it? That antelopes in Africa have done the same for hunting lions? They know. They know it in the group-souls they share, life after life, until they individualize as men. I know you don’t believe that, but it’s what Buddhists teach—”

She stroked my face; she let me hold her close. “What have we done to them, for years and years, as our highway speeds went up and our concern went down? Have you ever seen a dead animal even thrown off a freeway, Garry—except deer, because they’re big enough to cause accidents? No, no! We leave them there, to be crushed, flattened thin, rubbed into the fabric of our concrete—even their hair, their hides—until they vanish. No other animals can get to them to profit by their deaths, not even buzzards—no, not even ants! And that is what they do not understand, their useless dying, the contemptuous coldness of our disregard; and in their chilly emptiness they hate us for it. More and more and more of them. They—they’ve reached critical mass. It was no hologram that tried to kill us! They’re striking back!”

I thought about Jung’s theory of group-souls. I remembered the stories of Lord Buddha, feeding his own body to hungry tigers.

“Garry, you’ve seen Kuniyoshi’s prints of monster cats! You’ve heard the legends, from every continent, of monster dogs and jaguars and wolves! They aren’t just legends. They’re real—but never, never, never on this scale. Lover, you must believe me. You must, you must! I felt it all when—when we went through that beast.”

I did remember the legends I had read. Even the one about the monstrous cat that’s said to haunt the lower corridors of the Capitol in Washington—still terrifying patrolling guards at night. I remembered, and in spite of logic, in spite of my own training—and also just because I knew my girl so well—I did believe.

“Marina,” I said then, “what can we do?”

“In Japan,” she told me, “the people who grow cultured pearls have segaki services performed for the spirits of all those oysters who die in making them. Samisen makers have them said for the dogs and cats whose skins are stretched over their instruments. It is an explanation, an apology. That is all they ask.”

“Who could we get to do it here? Christianity tells us animals have no souls. You know, ‘the beasts that perish.’”

Not all Christians believe that,” she answered, “nor all ministers, and there are many others who would help.”

“And how are we supposed to sell Chief Sam on the idea?”

She kissed me, there next to the haunted highway. “We’ll have no trouble there,” she declared. “His people never did deny that animals have souls.”

It took Chief Sam a little while to get things organized, especially without stirring up a mess of controversy. But he managed it, and we were surprised at how many people from how many different faiths came to our assistance. (The media hardly touched it, and when they did they treated it as nut stuff, as a joke.) Within ten days, the one-car fatal accident rate had plummeted; in three weeks it had returned to normal. In a month, almost everyone had forgotten it completely, and I was trying to.

Then, in February, the Chief and I had to take Emmie Bostwick up to Denver to check out an anonymous assassination warning, which turned out to be baseless. We had an early supper and headed back, praying that the roads would all be dry and open. We did have bad weather for the first two hours; then it cleared and before we knew it the traffic was all passing us, trying to make up time.

Our first hint of trouble came around 10 o’clock, when the feeling came to me. I thought, “Jesus, not again!”—still seeing that wildcat in my mind’s eye. Then, to my relief, Emmie started breathing hoarsely, as she always does when one of her impressions starts coming through. “I get a great big car like, or maybe it’s a bus,” she told us. “It’s full of men, just men. They—oh, they scare me! Something’s gonna happen! One of ’em’s up front, where he oughtn’t be, up past the—I guess it’s wire—and—oh, no, no! Don’t you do it! Oh, Chief Sam, he’s goin’ to do something to the driver—with a knife! And—” She shuddered and was silent. “Man! I’m sure glad that’s gone,” she muttered finally.

Chief Sam soothed her, and we drove on. It was a full hour before we saw the traffic block, the blue lights, ambulances, wreckers, all clustered around an overpass. I swung our own light down against the windshield, and on the shoulder we passed the long halted line. We stopped behind a knot of police cars. Sam and I got out. The freeway for a hundred yards was strewn with shattered metal, torn metal, twisted metal, metal charred out of all recognition, shattered glass, and—well, other things. Above it all, there was a great gap in the railing of the overpass.

We found Tod Welles there, in charge. He filled us in. “At least, Colonel,” he told Sam, “it’s not a one-car deal, so you don’t have to worry, but it’s really going to be a bugger to clean up. The bus—”

The bus had been state owned, on its way from Andriess Hospital, maximum security for the criminally insane, loaded with more than thirty of their hopeless cases—all kinky killers who had killed again inside, or tried to. They were being moved to a special new even-more-maximum facility, and one of them—though nobody could figure how—had gotten to the driver and cut his throat—

Sam and I looked at one another, thinking of Emmie.

—and the bus had plunged straight down into the path of a truck and trailer loaded with steel pipe, trying to make 90 miles an hour. It was like being hit by an express train—

Welles gestured at the road. “Two survivors,” he told us. “One guard, one prisoner. About a dozen of the bodies are sort of in one piece. The rest have all been through the shredder. And now it’s fixing up to snow.” He gestured at a few flakes that had started falling. “We’ll be lucky to get the big hunks found and the road opened before a storm hits.”

The wrecker crews were hauling and pushing metal off the highway; the ambulance men, some carrying stretchers, some with baskets, were going about their grimmer business.

Welles kept looking at his watch. “At least,” he said, “it’s not like we were dealing with real people, except the driver and the guards. Those bastards were subhuman, every damn one of ’em. No loss.” He shrugged. “Hell, what we can’t find of them the big rigs’ll take care of.”

Chief Sam and I looked at each other once again, and I knew that he and I were thinking the same thing, and I could feel gooseflesh all along my arms.

Then he took Tod Welles aside, and spoke to him quietly and very seriously; and we left him there after we’d said goodnight.

“What’s he going to do?” I asked, as we walked back.

“He’s going to stay till every piece is found—each ear, each finger-bone, each scrap of flesh. He doesn’t understand, but he’ll do what I asked him to.” He drew a deep breath. “Garry,” he said, “there are some things we mustn’t take a chance on. Not ever.”